© 2024 Jan Herca (license Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
The Sun, our nearest star, is one of the most important sources of our scientific knowledge about how the universe works. We have known for quite some time that, despite its large size in the sky, it is just an ordinary star like millions of other similar stars that we see in the firmament as simple points. However, the Sun is the source of energy that drives almost all of our planet’s biological processes and therefore makes material life possible on our world. The scientist in all of us is inevitably plagued by a question: Will the Sun continue to be this invaluable source of energy in the ages to come? Will its fuel one day run out and it die, becoming a sad white dwarf? What will happen then to the future civilization living in our solar system? Will it have to migrate to other suns? What is the fate of the Sun, and therefore, our fate?
The Urantia Book already provided elaborate answers to these intriguing questions back in 1935, when it was written. And the wealth of information that populates its pages anticipated in many ways what science at that time was capable of theorizing, and even predated today’s knowledge.In this report, we’ll review some of the most surprising information the book offers about the Sun, to compare it with what current science has been able to determine.
¶ Energy galore
An average sun like ours releases an exorbitant amount of energy every second. We are barely aware of the enormous waste of energy the Sun pours into space. It is estimated that the Sun has a power of 380 trillion terawatts (TW)[1], or what is the same, every second the Sun produces 105.55 109 TWh (terawatt-hours). This inconceivable figure can be put into perspective if we consider that global energy production[2] was 147,899 TWh in 2010 and in 2017 rose to 162,494 TWh. Therefore, in one second, the Sun is capable of producing almost 650,000 times all the energy produced by humans throughout the entire year of 2017.
Seeing these data, it’s understandable that many, in the era in which we live, wonder how it is possible that our civilization has energy problems and how it is that we remain tied to fossil fuels for our primary sources of energy. In just one second, the Sun is capable of producing all the energy that the human race would need in more than 600,000 years. It’s absurdly incredible.
The first thing one feels upon hearing something like this is rejection. It’s not possible. Where does the Sun get such an amount of energy? How has it been operating for millions of years at this runaway rate of energy waste without running out?
This question was already on the minds of scientists at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1920, Sir Arthur Eddington, based on measurements by F.W. Aston, suggested the possibility that stars obtained their energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen to produce helium. In 1928, George Gamow obtained the Gamow factor, or probability that at a certain temperature two nuclei close enough together will produce a nuclear reaction. Between 1938 and 1939, the American Hans Bethe and the German Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker determined the possible processes that would give rise to stellar energy, but it was not until 1957 that Fred Hoyle[3] published the fundamental article, in collaboration with William Fowler, in which the nucleosynthesis of carbon[4] was finally determined. Hoyle predicted the existence of certain energy levels for carbon atoms.
The Urantia Book already anticipated these approaches long before Hoyle described them, since it says:
In those suns which are encircuited in the space-energy channels, solar energy is liberated by various complex nuclear-reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction. In this metamorphosis, carbon acts as an energy catalyst since it is in no way actually changed by this process of converting hydrogen into helium. Under certain conditions of high temperature the hydrogen penetrates the carbon nuclei. Since the carbon cannot hold more than four such protons, when this saturation state is attained, it begins to emit protons as fast as new ones arrive. In this reaction the ingoing hydrogen particles come forth as a helium atom. UB 41:8.1
Note how it says “certain levels of saturation in the carbon atoms,” which may well be referring to the energetic resonance of carbon atoms that Hoyle later discovered. Note also how he describes carbon as an “energy catalyst.” This function of carbon was discovered shortly after the book was written. Today, we know that the Sun runs primarily on two types of chemical reactions that convert hydrogen into helium: one, known as the proton-proton chain reaction[5], is primarily responsible for energy for stars the size of the Sun or smaller; the other, known as the CNO cycle (carbon-nitrogen-oxygen)[6], is more important in large stars and was proposed by Bethe and Weizsäcker between 1938 and 1939. In this second type of reaction, carbon acts as a catalyst, exactly as The Urantia Book predicted.
One might argue that even before The Urantia Book was written, the topic of solar nuclear fusion was known and circulating in academic circles. Someone knowledgeable in the subject could have written the excerpts from the book, or commented on them to the group receiving the documents, to include these scientific assertions and thus give a ring of truth to the Urantia revelations. This is very unlikely to be the case.
The number of people who were familiar with these topics back in the 1930s and beyond was very small. This was not the age of the Internet. Scientific publications were often limited to a very small, local sphere. The case of Fred Hoyle, for example, is striking. He published several scientific articles between 1946 and 1957. His work, of unique excellence, explained in great detail how elements heavier than hydrogen or helium could be formed inside stars, processes that released vast amounts of energy. But his work remained unknown to much of the scientific community until very recently. Such was the ignorance about the importance of his work that when the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 to the discoverers of these subjects, they awarded it to William Fowler, a collaborator of Hoyle, instead of him.
But the anticipations of The Urantia Book do not end here. The authors, who aim to provide some background on stellar nucleogenesis and nuclear reactions to clarify how suns are so energetic, introduced key data to understand these reactions. And the key element is temperature.
¶ It’s all a matter of temperature
The way the Sun is able to generate a formidable amount of energy is due to the extreme temperatures of its core. These temperatures are so high that the gases there are in a unique state of matter. This state is called plasma. [7] Apart from the three best-known states of matter—gas, liquid, and solid—there is a fourth state, plasma. In this gas-like state, particles are charged (ionized) and have high electrical conductivity. Inside a Sun, the immense temperature keeps hydrogen and helium in this plasma state, which is perfect for the necessary nuclear reactions to occur.
Plasma was discovered in the late 19th century, but received almost no attention until Irving Langmuir began experimenting with it in 1928, coining the name by which it is known today. Further elaborating on what we said earlier about the difficulty with which scientific knowledge was disseminated in the first half of the 20th century, it is logical not to read the word plasma in The Urantia Book and instead read “supergas.” Langmuir coined the term in 1928, and when the book was written, the term was not yet in common use.
When suns that are too large are thrown off a nebular mother wheel, they soon break up or form double stars. All suns are originally truly gaseous, though they may later transiently exist in a semiliquid state. When your sun attained this quasi-liquid state of supergas pressure, it was not sufficiently large to split equatorially, this being one type of double star formation. UB 41:3.3
Cooling stars can be physically gaseous and tremendously dense at the same time. You are not familiar with the solar supergases, but these and other unusual forms of matter explain how even nonsolid suns can attain a density equal to iron—about the same as Urantia—and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and continue to function as suns. The atoms in these dense supergases are exceptionally small; they contain few electrons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ultimatonic stores of energy. UB 41:4.3
[…] In many of the younger stars continued gravity condensation produces ever-heightening internal temperatures, and as internal heat increases, the interior X-ray pressure of supergas winds becomes so great that, in connection with the centrifugal motion, a sun begins to throw its exterior layers off into space, thus redressing the imbalance between gravity and heat. UB 41:9.4
2. [The second type of matter occurring in suns is] subelectronic matter—the explosive and repellent stage of the solar supergases. UB 42:3.4
It seems clear that when The Urantia Book speaks of supergases, it is referring to what later became commonly known as plasma.
How hot must such gases be to be in the plasma state? Extraordinary. For that reason, to show us how large these numbers are, The Urantia Book offers a fact unknown to the science of 1935:
It should be remembered that spectral analyses show only sun-surface compositions. For example: Solar spectra exhibit many iron lines, but iron is not the chief element in the sun. This phenomenon is almost wholly due to the present temperature of the sun’s surface, a little less than 6,000 degrees, this temperature being very favorable to the registry of the iron spectrum. UB 41:6.7
The internal temperature of many of the suns, even your own, is much higher than is commonly believed. […]
The surface temperature of your sun is almost 6,000 degrees, but it rapidly increases as the interior is penetrated until it attains the unbelievable height of about 35,000,000 degrees in the central regions. (All of these temperatures refer to your Fahrenheit scale.) UB 41:7.1-2
In the Spanish translation the degrees have been expressed in Celsius. It is also convenient to quote the original English version of the last paragraph here:
The surface temperature of your sun is almost 6,000 degrees, but it rapidly increases as the interior is penetrated until it attains the unbelievable height of about 35,000,000 degrees in the central regions. (All of these temperatures refer to your Fahrenheit scale.)
Applying the conversion formula between Fahrenheit and Celsius gives us a value of 3,315 degrees Celsius for the surface temperature of the Sun and a value of 19,444,426 degrees Celsius for the interior, slightly above, but similar to, the values in the Spanish translation of the European Edition of The Urantia Book. That is, the book states that the temperature at the center of the Sun is slightly over 19.4 million degrees Celsius.
In his book on astronomy, The Universe Around Us, Sir James Jeans gives the following indication: "Emden calculated in 1907 that the central temperature of a sun of this type [made of hydrogen] would be 31,500,000 degrees [absolute]. Later, more refined calculations by Eddington led to an almost identical temperature, but my own even later calculations give the substantially higher figure of 55,000,000 degrees [absolute]. There is no need at the moment to discuss which of these figures is closer to correct. Their diversity indicates the degree of uncertainty associated with calculations of this kind.[8]
The temperature given on the English Wikipedia as of today (2020) is 15.7 million degrees Kelvin (which at this time is like talking about degrees Celsius). Other publications give similar figures. For example, the National Geographic book Galaxy[9] gives the figure of 15.5 million degrees Celsius. Today, the most accurate and reliable source is provided by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)[10], launched in 1995, which also gives a figure of 15.5 million degrees Kelvin.
As can be seen, the temperatures for the Sun’s core estimated by science in 1935 were much higher than those offered by The Urantia Book, which are now seen to coincide much more closely with those calculated by current science, although those given in the book are somewhat higher. What doesn’t make sense is that the book states that “the internal temperature of the Sun is much higher than is believed.” What was widely believed at the time The Urantia Book was written was that the Sun’s interior temperature was much higher than what is reported in the book, as far as we have been able to determine from Sir James Jeans’s data from 1930. It is unknown why the authors of the book claim this.
Regarding what The Urantia Book says about the Sun’s surface temperature, a clear problem arises. A temperature commonly given today as the surface temperature of the Sun is 5,772 K or approximately 5,500 °C (Wikipedia), while the book speaks of 6,000 F, which is actually 3,315 °C. Is this a typographical error, meaning degrees Celsius or Kelvin? This seems unlikely, since the original version of the book clearly indicates that the figures are degrees Fahrenheit.
Many readers of The Urantia Book have been puzzled and intrigued by this apparent and notable error in the book, especially since the figure for the temperature of the Sun’s interior, which was very difficult to determine precisely in 1935, agrees relatively well with current science.
There are two possible explanations. The first is an error in the units. In Sir James Jeans’s 1930 book, The Universe Around Us, it is stated: “Either of these methods indicates that the temperature of the surface of the Sun is 6,000 degrees absolute [=5,727°C] […]”[11]. Absolute units or Kelvin (K) are described in Jeans’ book (page 102) as the preferable units to use. The figure given by Jeans is identical to the one in The Urantia Book and does not deviate far from what current science has determined. Could it be that when The Urantia Book was transcribed, someone inadvertently added 6,000 degrees as a Fahrenheit temperature instead of Kelvin? If this were the case, and both temperatures in the paragraph in question were in Kelvin, then the error would be in the interior temperature.
Another possible explanation is an error in the consideration of what exactly the “surface of the Sun” is. The current temperature of 5,772 K refers to the temperature in the photosphere, but this is only a part of the solar surface.
It is worth pausing to explain how the Sun is constituted according to current scientific models. The structure of the Sun is considered to have six layers: the core, the radiant zone, the tachocline, the convective zone, the photosphere, and the atmosphere. In these layers, the temperature constantly decreases from the hotter core to the less hot atmosphere (except for certain outer areas of the solar atmosphere where the temperature rises again dramatically).
The surface part, therefore, is the atmosphere. But this area is very complex. Science has identified five main zones in the Sun’s atmosphere: the minimum temperature region, the chromosphere, the transition region, the corona, and the heliosphere. The chromosphere, the transition region, and the corona are all much hotter than the rest of the Sun’s atmosphere. The coldest layer of the Sun is the minimum temperature region, about 500 km above the photosphere, with a temperature of approximately 4,100 K or 6,920 F / 3,827 °C. Therefore, it would have to be said that the book, if it were referring to this region, would be more in agreement with current science. It would offer a minimum surface temperature somewhat lower than the one offered by science, but within a logical range. And it makes sense that the temperature offered in the book is the minimum, since in the same paragraph the authors seem to want to highlight the enormous variation in temperatures that exists from the minimum in the atmosphere to the maximum in the interior. Had they offered values for the other parts of the solar atmosphere, where the temperature rises into the millions of degrees, something for which present-day science has no explanation, the authors would not have been able to adequately express this idea of a temperature contrast from less to more as one goes deeper into the sun.
¶ The Sun Grows Thinner
Here we have a good discrepancy between The Urantia Book and present-day science. The book states the following:
Your own solar center radiates almost one hundred billion tons of actual matter annually [= 0.003 million tons per second] […] UB 41:9.3
We know that the Sun, in generating its enormous energy, converts part of its mass into energy, and expels another part due to the enormous forces radiating from its interior. Current science estimates that the Sun loses mass due to two causes. The first is the effect of the solar wind. The Sun’s surface is hot enough for electrons and protons to boil off its surface and move away from the Sun, generating a “wind” of ionized particles. When these particles hit Earth’s upper atmosphere, they can produce auroras. The intensity of the solar wind varies somewhat, but from satellite observations we know that the Sun loses about 1.5 million tons of material per second due to the solar wind.
The second way the Sun loses mass is through nuclear fusion. The Sun fuses hydrogen into helium in its core, producing its lifeblood glow over billions of years. The production of helium transforms some of the hydrogen’s mass into energy, which radiates away from the Sun in the form of light and neutrinos. By looking at how much energy the Sun radiates, and using Einstein’s equation relating mass and energy, we find that the Sun loses about 4 million tons of mass every second due to fusion.[12]
The mass the Sun loses through fusion is mass emitted as energy. We couldn’t consider it “real matter.” It’s pure energy, so we could consider the mass the Sun ejects or radiates to be solely due to the solar wind. But this mass has been estimated to be 1.5 million tons per second. That’s 47,304,000 million tons per year, not the 100,000 million tons per year predicted in the book. Perhaps current science has exaggerated the solar wind’s magnitude and therefore reduced the lifespan of our star? Could this be a typo in the original English, where “trillion” was replaced by “billion”?
In his book on astronomy, Sir James Jeans mentions nothing about the solar wind. He gives figures for solar mass loss through fusion similar to those of current science, 360 billion tons per day[13], that is, 4.16 million tons every second, but regarding possible mass ejection due to the solar wind, there is nothing. The curious thing is that Sir Arthur Eddington had already addressed the subject of the solar wind in 1910, although he did not call it that. But it seems that Eddington’s studies went unnoticed, as did later studies by the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland, who died prematurely in 1917[14]. The solar wind would not return to the attention of physicists until after the great wars. So where does this figure of 100 billion tons per year come from? It is an enigma for the moment, but it does not agree at all with current scientific figures.
¶ The Density of the Sun
The Urantia Book offers more interesting data about the Sun:
The mass of your sun is slightly greater than the estimate of your physicists, who have reckoned it as about two octillion (2 x 1027) tons [= 1,800 Yt or yottatons]. It now exists about halfway between the most dense and the most diffuse stars, having about one and one-half times the density of water. But your sun is neither a liquid nor a solid—it is gaseous—and this is true notwithstanding the difficulty of explaining how gaseous matter can attain this and even much greater densities. UB 41:4.1
The mass of the Sun has always been a very difficult value to determine despite Newton’s discovery of his law of gravitation. Newton himself determined the ratio of the mass of the Sun to that of the Earth, but not the actual value. The calculation requires knowing other variables that are difficult to obtain, such as the astronomical unit (AU) or distance between the Earth and the Sun, and the universal gravitational constant (G). Since the Earth follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, the solar mass can be calculated from the equation for the orbital period (one year = 1 yr) for a small body orbiting a central mass. For the Sun this would be:
In his 1930 astronomy book, Sir James Jeans comments that «the mass of the Sun is 2 1033 grams», that is, 2 1027 tonnes (2,000 Yt yottatonnes)[15]. The English Wikipedia also gives the value 2 1027 tonnes[16], which is still used today in cosmology as a unit of measurement, the solar mass (). More specifically, it says that tonnes. The current data provided by the SOHO observatory for the mass of the Sun is 2.2 1027 tonnes.
It is odd that the author of The Urantia Book 41 states that the scientists’ estimate of the Sun’s mass is 1.8 1027 tons when the value given by Sir James Jeans back in 1930 is 2 1027 tons, very close to the current estimate, and therefore in agreement with the book’s statement that the correct value is slightly higher. It is clear that the authors of the book did not use Sir James Jeans as their source of information.
Sir James Jeans gives the figure that “the average density of the Sun is 1.4, which means that the average cubic meter in the Sun contains 1.4 tons of matter.”[17] The densities in this book are given relative to the density of water, so the statement in The Urantia Book is consistent with the science of 1935. The English Wikipedia gives us the average density of the Sun as 1.408 times the density of water, so the revelations’ figure seems to be a correct rounding, stating “about one and a half times the density of water.”
¶ Will our Sun die?
If there is one thing on which The Urantia Book and current science differ, it is in their way of predicting the future and fate of suns. Science is governed by the Law of Conservation of Matter, a law that, extended to the theory of relativity, implies that if there is no conservation of mass, it is because the missing mass has been converted into energy, following Einstein’s famous equation. This means that our Sun will lose mass over time, and that these losses will inevitably lead to the complete depletion of the fuel necessary to maintain the pressure of the external gases. That is, our Sun will follow the path known as the “main sequence,” according to which the Sun, as it loses mass, will become increasingly hotter because the helium resulting from nuclear fusion is heavier and more compact than hydrogen. The smaller size will shrink the Sun, and the outer layers will exert more gravitational pressure, which, as we know, is a function of the inverse square of the distance. To withstand this new pressure, the Sun will have to burn fuel at an ever-increasing rate, accelerating the loss of mass and accelerating the rise in temperature in the interior. When the Sun finally reaches a certain critical temperature, the large amounts of central helium will begin to burn, and the Sun will begin to swell. This is what is known as a red giant[18]. The Sun is estimated to reach this state in 5 to 6 billion years, and it will be a gradual, slow process of about 600 million years during which the Sun will grow so large that it will swallow Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. When it reaches its maximum size and luminosity, it will be 260 times larger than it is today and 2,700 times more luminous.
It goes without saying that according to this scenario, any possibility of life on Earth will be zero, no matter what technology we are able to create. Even long before the Sun enters the red giant phase, just 600 million years from now, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will have reduced CO2 to amounts critical to support plant life. When the luminosity exceeds 10%, the average temperature on Earth will be 47 °C. The atmosphere will become a humid greenhouse, leading to the rapid evaporation of the oceans, and the Earth will become a planet like Venus.
As if this scenario weren’t enough to sweep humanity away from Earth, when the Sun reaches its peak red giant state, despite having lost enormous amounts of mass from its outer regions and having pushed the planets from their orbits, it will swallow the Earth. The friction of our beloved planet with the solar corona and the enormous temperatures will cause the loss of the crust and mantle until every molecule on Earth is completely destroyed, the atoms becoming part of the entire Sun. [19]
This apocalyptic vision is the official position of science. The material universe exists to die. One day, even the Sun will die. When hydrogen is exhausted, it will begin to burn helium to carbon in a desperate attempt to survive. Then it will contract again. These contractions will cause explosive waves that will scatter large portions of the Sun, forming what is known as a planetary nebula. After this, the Sun’s fate will be sealed. The final compaction will leave the Sun with almost no fuel left to burn, and it will transform into a white dwarf. What will become of the Sun from then on is unknown. Some postulate that it will give rise to a black dwarf, a star that no longer emits light or heat. And beyond that, it will only have to wait for the universe itself to die in the Big Rip.
The scientific vision of the destiny of suns and the universe in general has always struck me as unbearably dramatic. To think that all the immensity and beauty of the universe, not to mention the unique wealth of the Earth and human civilization, are merely temporary and fleeting creations, transient, doomed to disappear, provokes a feeling of perplexity. Of course, it eliminates the possibility of the existence of a Creator God, because what Creator God could be so absurd as to create such an infinite work, so immense, so immeasurable, only to then let it evaporate in the distant future? It’s as if a sculptor, having completed a magnificent piece, the finest work of his life, took a chisel and hammer and began to hammer at it until it was destroyed. As if a writer, at the height of his career, created his best novel, his debut work, and at that final moment, took the draft and threw it into the fire. It seems irrational, illogical, and devoid of all sense.
Perhaps that’s why Carl Sagan told us in his popular writings that human beings are a wandering race.[20] We’re here only to find a way to emigrate from the solar system, to seek a new Earth, somewhere else. Film and television, science fiction, have shown us this many times. Just as we’ve circumnavigated the globe and discovered all the continents, how could we not be able to develop technology in the coming years or centuries that will take us to the stars? Alpha Centauri has three stars, and it’s just around the corner, isn’t it?
Perhaps we have trouble understanding that Earth-like distances can’t be extrapolated to the universe. The more than four light-years that separate us from Alpha Centauri are a hellish journey of tens of thousands of years, even for our fastest technology today. Hellish because of cosmic rays, those eternally forgotten ones that make interstellar space a place unlike any other for life, something from which not even the best shielding can protect astronauts.
Are we then doomed, irrevocably bound to die with our star?
The Urantia Book takes a radically different approach. According to the book, there are two kinds of suns: those doomed to die and those not.
Only those suns which function in the direct channels of the main streams of universe energy can shine on forever. Such solar furnaces blaze on indefinitely, being able to replenish their material losses by the intake of space-force and analogous circulating energy. But stars far removed from these chief channels of recharging are destined to undergo energy depletion—gradually cool off and eventually burn out.
Such dead or dying suns can be rejuvenated by collisional impact or can be recharged by certain nonluminous energy islands of space or through gravity-robbery of near-by smaller suns or systems. The majority of dead suns will experience revivification by these or other evolutionary techniques. Those which are not thus eventually recharged are destined to undergo disruption by mass explosion when the gravity condensation attains the critical level of ultimatonic condensation of energy pressure. Such disappearing suns thus become energy of the rarest form, admirably adapted to energize other more favorably situated suns. UB 41:7.14-15
In those suns which are encircuited in the space-energy channels, solar energy is liberated by various complex nuclear-reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium reaction
Reduction of hydrogen content increases the luminosity of a sun. In the suns destined to burn out, the height of luminosity is attained at the point of hydrogen exhaustion. Subsequent to this point, brilliance is maintained by the resultant process of gravity contraction. Eventually, such a star will become a so-called white dwarf, a highly condensed sphere. UB 41:8.1-2
Science considers that there is no possibility of adding matter to a sun. Once a sun is formed from a nebula or by condensation of a stellar cloud, the material that composes the sun is what it is. Contributions from meteorites, comets, or the solar wind from nearby stars never compensate for the enormous mass losses involved in nuclear reactions. Where, then, does one obtain the mass that allows a sun to remain intact for millions upon millions of years?
The answer in The Urantia Book is that there are “circuits or currents of energy” in the universe that connect areas where matter is consumed to form energy (“bright suns”) and areas where matter is produced from energy (“dark worlds”). The book puts it this way:
The blazing suns can transform matter into various forms of energy, but the dark worlds and all outer space can slow down electronic and ultimatonic activity to the point of converting these energies into the matter of the realms. Certain electronic associations of a close nature, as well as many of the basic associations of nuclear matter, are formed in the exceedingly low temperatures of open space, being later augmented by association with larger accretions of materializing energy. UB 42:4.9
What are the “dark worlds” the book speaks of? Is it perhaps referring to black holes? Elsewhere, the book mentions “enormous cold and dark giants of space” UB 41:2.7 and even asserts that these “dark giants of space, serve the power centers and physical controllers as way stations for the effective concentrating and directionizing of the energy circuits of the material creations” UB 41:3.1[21]. That is, the “energy circuits” are concentrated in them and serve as a dispatch point for energies throughout the universe. Could it be that the much-feared black holes are actually generators of matter from the fabric of space-time itself and the dense, concentrated energy-matter they possess? Notice how the book says that both the “dark worlds and all of outer space” can convert energy into matter.
If this is true, those suns fortunate enough to be located at the extreme ends of these matter circulation circuits could be receiving a constant material load to replenish the material losses caused by their nuclear reactions. Is this the case with our sun?
The Urantia Book doesn’t make it clear, but it seems implied that if there are two types of suns in the universe, the “permanent” suns must be those on which a civilization is established, while the “non-permanent” suns are suns that have failed to form any habitable planets and will eventually be left to die, only to be recycled. We have already seen that the fate of suns when they die is “to be rejuvenated by the impact of a collision, or recharged by certain energy islands […], or by stealing […] from nearby suns or systems.”
If the sun is a “permanent” star, then what the book says about its destiny is rather meaningless:
Your own sun has long since attained relative equilibrium between its expansion and contraction cycles, those disturbances which produce the gigantic pulsations of many of the younger stars. Your sun is now passing out of its six billionth year [= 6 Gyr gigayears]. At the present time it is functioning through the period of greatest economy. It will shine on as of present efficiency for more than twenty-five billion years. It will probably experience a partially efficient period of decline as long as the combined periods of its youth and stabilized function. UB 41:9.5
Regarding the figure for the age of the Sun, the science of 1935 gave a value of 8 trillion years (= 8,000 Gyr gigayears) [22] and current science gives one of 4.57 (± 0.11) Gyr, 4.57 billion years[23]. The discrepancy between the data handled at the time of writing The Urantia Book and the current ones are more than notable. What is impressive is that the book, far from using figures typical of the time in which it was written, offers a figure of 6 billion years, which is very much in line with what current science estimates.
Regarding the figure for how long the Sun may last in the future, in 1935 data such as a trillion years were handled (= 1,000 Gyr, according to Sir James Jeans). Current figures suggest that we will enter the red giant phase in 5 billion years (= 5 Gyr). That is, we are more or less halfway there. As we can see, the figures at the time the book was written were clearly exaggerated. But curiously, the figure given in the book is 25 billion years (= 25 Gyr). How is it possible that the Sun can last that many years “shining at its current efficiency” when science predicts that in just 5 billion Gyr it will have already begun to transform into a red giant? The only explanation is that the Sun is a “permanent” star, channeled into universal energy circuits that ensure it can shine indefinitely. Despite this, the book leaves us intrigued when it says that “[the Sun] is likely to experience a period of partially efficient decline.” What does it mean by a period of decline? Will the Sun at some point lose its status as a “permanent” star?
It is striking that the book does not speak at any point of the Sun’s fate as a red giant and then a white dwarf. It speaks of a “solar decline” but without being more specific. And it has no problem speaking of other stars as entering the red giant or white dwarf phase (we understand that it refers to “non-lasting” stars):
One of your near-by suns, which started life with about the same mass as yours, has now contracted almost to the size of Urantia, having become forty thousand times as dense as your sun. The weight of this hot-cold gaseous-solid is about one ton per cubic inch. And still this sun shines with a faint reddish glow, the senile glimmer of a dying monarch of light. UB 41:4.4
Another of the Orvonton giants now has a surface temperature a trifle under three thousand degrees. Its diameter is over three hundred million miles—ample room to accommodate your sun and the present orbit of the earth. And yet, for all this enormous size, over forty million times that of your sun, its mass is only about thirty times greater. These enormous suns have an extending fringe that reaches almost from one to the other. UB 41:4.7
Most of the giant suns are relatively young; most of the dwarf stars are old, but not all. The collisional dwarfs may be very young and may glow with an intense white light, never having known an initial red stage of youthful shining. Both very young and very old suns usually shine with a reddish glow. The yellow tinge indicates moderate youth or approaching old age, but the brilliant white light signifies robust and extended adult life. UB 41:3.7
The first of the above statements, “a sun near us,” refers to a white dwarf, a sun the size of our own that eventually compacts to the size of a planet like Earth. The second statement refers to one of the largest suns in existence, and it is clearly in the red giant phase, indicating that it would fit within the orbit of Earth. Thus The Urantia Book admits the existence of red giants and white dwarfs as common phases of suns. Could this be the fate of our sun? It is not clear.
The Urantia Book gives a clue as to what proportion of suns are “permanent” and which are “non-permanent” when it says that Satania, the star group to which our sun belongs, consists of “more than two thousand suns” UB 41:3.1 and yet is projected to have only one thousand inhabited planets (there are currently 619 inhabited planets) UB 49:0.2-3. That means that there are roughly twice as many stars as inhabited planets (if we exclude the fact that some solar systems harbor more than one inhabited planet). The math is simple enough: one out of every two stars in our stellar neighborhood is a “permanent” star and contains or will contain one or more inhabited planets; The other 50% are “non-long-lived” stars, which will go through the typical phases of the “main sequence” and die. It should be relatively easy to confirm these hypotheses. We could take the 2,000 stars closest to us and find out whether there are stars at the limits of the main sequence or outside it; these should not represent more than 50%. 50% would have to be made up of stars at the core of the main sequence.
Is there any way to verify The Urantia Book’s predictions about the continued existence of the Sun?
If the Sun is receiving inputs of matter from outer space through energy circuits, it should be detectable. As the Sun burns its fuel, some of its mass is lost as energy. We noted earlier that current science estimates this loss at 5.5 million tons per second, or 173.45 trillion tons per year. This difference in mass over the years should cause the planets to orbit slightly farther from the Sun over time. Is it possible to measure this shift on Earth or the other planets? The answer is virtually impossible.
Leaving aside the fact that the Earth is subject to rotation around the Sun in an elliptical manner, and that therefore the distance to the Sun is not constant, and leaving aside the fact that the Moon also causes wobbling movements on Earth, which are very small but do exist, the change in distance to the Earth due to the loss of mass from the Sun represents a tiny, undetectable annual distancing from the Earth. It is estimated that over the average main sequence lifetime of 10 billion years, the Sun will lose 0.1% of its mass, which means that the Sun will move about 150,000 km (very little compared to the approximately 150,000,000 km that separate us from the Sun). That is to say, on average, each year the Earth may be moving away from the Sun by no more than 1.5 cm. We would need historical measurements of the distance to the Sun, made with a precision beyond even our current measuring devices and over periods of at least 100 years. This cannot be verified by this method.
Another way to verify the hypotheses of The Urantia Book could be to try to locate those energy lines that supposedly feed the Sun. The book tells us that they connect “black holes” with the Sun. We could look for nearby black holes, trace the connecting lines, and send probes to those areas of the solar system where the line connecting the black hole to the Sun enters. There we should detect traces of that mysterious energy that prevents the Sun from losing mass. But it is very risky to think that a space agency would send expensive probes into space just to verify a conjecture based on “dubious revelations.”
¶ Conclusions
As we have seen, science and The Urantia Book agree relatively well with the numerical data relating to the Sun, albeit with some notable exceptions. The temperature inside the Sun is in relative agreement with current science (15.5 million degrees Celsius compared to the book’s 19.4 million Celsius) and is even much better than the estimates made by science at the time the book was written. The surface temperature is more striking, because a figure of 3,315 Celsius is given, which is close to a minimum of 3,827 Celsius, which was only recently discovered and about which nothing was known until 1935. The Sun’s matter emissions, however, differ markedly from the scientific data, something that is nonetheless logical in light of everything previously said about the mechanisms of “solar mass recovery” mentioned in the book. The revelations speak of 100 billion tons of matter emitted per year. Science says it is 473 times more. Regarding the solar mass, the figures are very similar in the book and science: 1.8 billion tons in the former and 2.2 billion tons in the latter, and the same is true for solar density. Finally, the age of the Sun is very much in line with modern science (6 billion years versus 4.57 billion years), which contrasts with the wildly outlandish figures of billions of years given back in 1935, which the book’s authors ignored.
Regarding the hypotheses about nuclear reactions, the book once again hits the nail on the head, with the authors advocating for a theory, that of the carbon cycle, which, although already known at the time of its writing, was not confirmed as true until quite some time later.
The only point where there is a strong discrepancy between The Urantia Book and current science is, logically, in the hypotheses about the fate of the Sun. The book’s conception of the universe, which completely breaks with the vision offered by the Big Bang theory, logically results in the book’s figures and postulates not being consistent with science. Despite this, they are consistent with their assertions. If there is a “continuous creation of matter,” as the book postulates, we would expect to find very low rates of matter emissions from the Sun, something we have already indicated the book quantifies, and also to find a much longer lifespan of the Sun (science estimates it at 5 billion years, and the book estimates it to be five times that figure). Therefore, we can conclude that as The Urantia Book increasingly confronts current science, as is also the case in other areas of knowledge, we are increasingly amazed by the book’s capacity for prediction and anticipation, as well as its closeness to what science is discovering.
¶ Summary
| Predictions of The Urantia Book | Science 1935 |
Science Today |
|---|---|---|
| Sun Facts | ||
| Core Temperature (19.4 MK megakelvin) | 31.5 MK | 15.5 MK |
| Surface Temperature (3,315°C) | 5,727°C | 3,827°C |
| Ejected Mass (0.003 Mt/s megatons/s) | ? | 1.5 Mt/s |
| Mass (1,800 Yt yottatons) | 2,000 Yt | 2,200 Yt |
| Density (≈1.5 times that of water) | 1.4 | 1.408 |
| Age (6 Gyr gigayears) | 8 Tyr | 4.57 Gyr |
| Remaining lifetime (>25 Gyr) | 1 Tyr | 5 Gyr |
¶ For further exploration
- Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 1930.
- Manuel Masip Mellado, Los rayos cósmicos (Cosmic Rays), RBA Coleccionables, National Geographic, 2016.
- David Galadí-Enríquez, La evolución estelar (Stellar Evolution), RBA Coleccionables, National Geographic, 2016.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980.
- Galaxia, National Geographic, with a foreword by Chris Hadfield, RBA Libros, 2018.
¶ References
¶ Notes
Key World Energy Statistics www.iea.org. International Energy Agency. ↩︎
Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a famous English astronomer, science popularizer, and science fiction novelist. He was a misunderstood and controversial genius. Aside from his success in revealing the processes of stellar nucleogenesis, he vigorously opposed the Big Bang theory. In fact, he coined the term “Big Bang” on a radio program as a way to ridicule the theory. In 1948, along with other collaborators, he proposed the “steady state theory,” an alternative to the Big Bang to explain a stationary but inflating cosmos. This theory postulated a continuous creation of matter. He also proposed the “panspermia theory,” according to which life did not originate on Earth. These ideas, which have not been widely accepted, curiously have incredible parallels with many statements in “The Urantia Book,” which also flatly rejects the “Big Bang” theory and the formation of life by mere chemical chance. Wikipedia ↩︎
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the set of nuclear reactions that take place in stars to obtain the enormous energy that escapes from them. Wikipedia ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1930, p. 288. ↩︎
Galaxia, National Geographic, with a foreword by Chris Hadfield, RBA Libros, 2018, p. 128. ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1930, p. 256. ↩︎
Information obtained from The Sun is losing mass ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1930, p. 187. ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 1930, p. 45, 286. ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1930, p. 290. ↩︎
“It is in our nature to explore. We began as wandering people, and so we still are. Too long have we been on the shore of the cosmic ocean. Now we are ready to set sail for the stars.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980. ↩︎
A “dark giant of space” named Angona, the book says, was once responsible for the formation of the solar system. See UB 57:5.4. ↩︎
Sir James Jeans, The Universe Around Us, Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1930, p. 181. ↩︎
A.Bonanno, H.Schlattl, L.Paterno, The age of the Sun and the relativistic corrections in the EOS, Astrononomy & Astrophysics, 2008. ↩︎